Rebecca Gourevitch: Fighting Gentrification with Documentary

Rebecca Gourevitch, a masters student in the Social Documentation program in Film and Digital Media, spends time with Sylvia Smith, a San Francisco resident who has lived in her apartment for over thirty years.

With an eviction crisis reaching epic proportions in San Francisco, the city's residents must navigate changing landscapes and communities, while also facing the loss of their homes. Using storytelling to explore themes of memory, history, and community, Rebecca’s current documentary project, Holding Out, follows four embattled tenants as they reflect on their lives and fight eviction. Questioning the relationship between developers and City Hall, Holding Out exposes what is at stake, and who stands to lose, in San Francisco’s determined quest to assert its role as the tech capital of the world.

Rebecca was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and received her BA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz. As an undergraduate student, she became active in the Labor Movement organizing with the Student Worker Labor Coalition and the Reel Works Labor Film Festival. From 2011 - 2014 she worked as a Tenant Organizer with the San Francisco Tenants Union. During this time Rebecca was involved with Occupy San Francisco and later helped form Eviction Free San Francisco, a group that confronts landlords and real estate speculators through creative direct actions. Rebecca’s documentary work examines the ongoing struggles surrounding gentrification and the subsequent displacement and changing landscapes of urban cities. Her intent is to preserve the identity and imagery of communities, and those who inhabit them.